Archive for October 8, 2014

Wednesday, October 8, 2014

The Source of Technote #2034

Former Apple Evangelist Tim Holmes started a huge Twitter reply chain referring to this podcast episode:

I admit responsibility for Technote 2034. An act of civil disobedience.

It’s Avie’s 10 commandments. I felt devs should know. Some engineers felt they were losing Mac OS.

As a non-coder, I was less personally offended than some, but paths sure did feel like the beginning of the end.

I had an agenda… impart a reality check. It was ’01… no way devs could comply.

Still have 2001 emails as to why & from outraged devs asking if I’d seen it & if I could help fix it

Fragility is the real issue. Remove a few letters and it breaks w/no easy fix.

Avi Drissman:

Back in 2002, Apple published a technote, Technote 2034, which was one of the most pro-Next, anti-classic-Apple things that was seen in a long while. It was met with immediate, violent reaction, and Apple withdrew it.

Of course, I wrote a reply which I emailed to Apple and filed as a bug in Radar (closed as duplicate). But that didn’t seem to be enough, so for WWDC 2002, I made up a batch of No To TN2034 buttons that I handed out.

John Gruber (2003):

Tevanian’s legacy is marred, however, by Mac OS X’s usability flaws, most of which are attributable to Tevanian’s nearly unyielding obsession with promoting old Next technology over old Apple technology. His technical acumen may be undisputed, but neither is his tin ear for usability.

Epitomizing this flaw was the infamous Technical Note #2034, entitled “Mac OS X Programming Guidelines”, which as reported by MDJ was written by Tevanian personally. Technote #2034 was so inflammatory, and in places so ludicrous, that Apple withdrew it afters howls of derision from professional Mac developers.

1Password 5.1 and Touch ID Changes

The 1Password 5.1 update seems to improve the situation with Touch ID. Most significantly, storing the master password in the iOS keychain seems to work now, whereas before I was often prompted to type the password.

The settings have been simplified. If you enable Touch ID, 1Password will always store the master password in the keychain; there is no longer an option to turn this off. If your iPhone supports Touch ID, you are no longer allowed to set a PIN code. There’s also one timeout instead of two, and there’s a new option to allow the use of third-party keyboards.

Gatekeeper’s CDHash Whitelist

Daniel Jalkut has solved the “accepted cdhash” mystery with Mac OS X 10.9.5’s Gatekeeper:

My suspicion is that in the run-up to the major changes Apple has made to Gatekeeper, they painstakingly accumulated a list of 36215 “trusted” hashes and deposited them on everybody’s Mac so that the effect of 10.9.5’s stricter code signing checks would be mitigated.

[…]

This whitelist offers a significant amount of explanation as to why some apps are allowed to launch without issue on 10.9.5 and 10.10.

Edward Marczak:

10.9.4 ran an agent that uploaded these to Apple. That’s where they get the mass hash list from.

Daniel Jalkut:

Everybody has to start signing with the modern code-signing infrastructure. In the interim, there’s a good chance your app has been whitelisted to operate as usual during the transition, but that courtesy will probably not extend to your next release.

Really poor communication from Apple here, but probably the right technical solution.

iOS 8 Photo Stream Confusion

I previously noted that iOS 8 removed the Camera Roll. The files from the camera are still stored on the iPhone, but they now appear under Recently Added.

Recently, I’ve found that the situation is even more confusing than I had thought. I used Image Capture on the Mac to delete lots of photos from my “camera roll” and free up space. With iOS 7, these photos would have been in both the Camera Roll and Photo Stream. The Image Capture clean-out would have removed the duplicate copies, and I would still be able to see my recent photos via Photo Stream in the Photos app.

With iOS 8, I am instead seeing behavior that makes no sense. The photos are still in Photo Stream, as verified in Aperture, but they are no longer visible on the phone. This is the All Photos view in the Photos app:

iOS 8 Photos

There is no more Photo Stream section of the Photos app, but I had expected to see the Photo Stream photos mixed into the above view. Indeed, Apple says:

In iOS 8, there’s no longer a separate My Photo Stream album. Instead, photos that were in the My Photo Stream album are now in the Recently Added album.

But that’s not what happens. In the Photos view, I see just a small number of recent photos (not cleared out with Image Capture) and some photos synced from iTunes. The Recently Added album only shows the former.

Even more confusing, the Settings app shows that Photo Stream is using 1.0 GB of space for photos that it won’t show me:

iOS 8 Photos Usage

Hopefully this is just a temporary hiccup until iCloud Photo Library is ready. The thing is, I don’t want Apple to store all my photos, and I don’t want to devote 1.0 GB of space on my iPhone to recent photos. All I want is to have new photos taken on the iPhone automatically transfer to my Mac without having to plug it in or manually initiate an import.